A REDE COMO INTERFACE EDUCATIVO
Dear Professor
Mike Wesch,
We are a group of
students from Universidade Aberta, Portugal, and we are delighted to review
some of your videos, within the curricular unit Educação e Sociedade em Rede,
taught by Professor António Teixeira. Therefore, we had the challenge of
launching a comment to these videos and we would like, first of all, to thank
you for the production of them.
Students Helping
Students shows the impact that a connected group with the same goal has on a
person's life is the main message of this video. In a cheerful and funny way
describes how the K-State Proud project benefited students, whose life stories
are dramatic. Students Helping Students reflects the most basic
instincts of human beings. We are all social and we feel empathy for our
species, and these features can be enlarged with the existence of social
networks that inhabit the digital territory. Communities increase and with them
their scope in obtaining common goals.
A Vision of Students
Today reflects the
current state of education and what technology has to offer for engagement and
motivation of students. This is, for us, the major message of the vídeo - the
need of approaching to today's students. The technology, present in students
lives, has a key role. The current model of education is obsolete and urges a
radical transformation that, once again, attract students to school and
education. As we all know, education is the basis for building the future and
the video refletcts the real experience in most teaching environments, showing
us the gap between the reality lived by the students and their daily school
life. The technology offers us a source of pedagogical scenarios which we
should not miss out as educators. The interactivity and the fast development of
knowledge in the network society, that we live in, is real. Therefore, should be promoted a change of
educational paradigm to walk for specific scenarios of XXI century education.
We must look at the students through their own eyes and this necessarily
entails this change and this transition to a dynamic, interactive and
collaborative learning network. We live in the world of images, the culture of
the spectacle. In this way, the existing educational setting no longer matches with
the current needs of our students, so let’s follow the vision of today's
students.
The Machine is
(Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity is about the new
media and relations that appear from Youtube. In a society ruled
and blinded by information, the conversations are empty of the social
dimension. The Web 2.0 allows new ways of comunication. Youtube becames a new
space for studying the human behaviour. The major conclusion is that
there is a release of personality, the recognition, which leads us to reflect
on ourselves. This new way of self-knowledge is generated by a new
individual authenticity and free expression.
The Whatever appointed as synonymous with generational indifference earns, currently, a
new meaning of cultural event : "I care Let's do whatever it take...by
whatever Means Necessary!". A cultural revolution can be unleashed by this
tool, however we are still trying to figure out the best way to handle that
advantage without be carried away by hysteria and novelty of the supremacy of
technology.
The Machine is us
/ ing (Final version) takes our attention to the simplest way to access the virtual world,
remarkably through hypertext links that take us to the cyberspace, the area of
direct and simple possible ways of the current digital age. The video shows us
in a very attractive way how we can make use of all the potential that Web 2.0
gives us. It’s clear that is very hard, for the youth, to produce texts using
the traditional way, using pen and paper, a reflex of being born in the digital
era. Despite these situations, we believe that new potential is very positive
wich set us to a number of information in seconds. Things that before was
necessary to take hours to find, in a balanced sense of quantity and quality of
information.
We finish our
comment with your own words, which means a lot for us as a team:
Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea
of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to
send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning
environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now
permeating our classrooms.
Thank you and best
regards,
Team CAPA 2015
Ana Melão, António Costa, Daniela Belo and Hélder
Pereira
Referências
Vídeos:
Students Helping Students. Spring 2010 Class of Digital
Ethnography. Disponível em:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_npqbMKzHl8;
A Vision of Students Today. Michael Wesch em colaboração
com 200 alunos da Kansas State University, BY-NC-SA license. Disponível em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o;
The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of
Authenticity. Apresentado em 2009 Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at
Lincoln Center. Diponível em:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gR6VPVrpw;
The Machine is Us/ing Us. Michael Wesch, BY-NC-SA
license. Disponível em:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g.
